Introduction

We live in times of ‘post-truth’ and fake news, and of the unreasoned and unreasoning use of social and other media, which may work to undermine reasoning and democratic life. Such challenges should remind us that democratic freedoms are not a given or guaranteed, yet we cannot achieve justice without such freedom. To take one example, the United Nations (UN) (2018) annual international democracy day focused in 2018 on “democracy under strain in our changing world”, providing an opportunity to look for ways to invigorate democracy and seek answers to systemic challenges. According to the UN, this includes tackling economic and political inequalities, making democracies more inclusive by bringing the young and marginalized into the political system, and making democracies more innovative and responsive to emerging challenges such as migration and climate change. The International Day of Democracy is also an opportunity to highlight the values of freedom and respect for human rights as essential elements of democracy and expansive human development (Haq 2003). We also live in time of global goals, currently the Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2015), which include goal 4—“Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (UN 2015, p. 7). Equity, access and quality are all emphasized, and education is understood as cross-cutting all of the 17 SDGs. The SDGs are meant to be “a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity” including democratic governance and peace-building.

Both the UN International Day of Democracy and the global goals of the SDGs suggest the significance of more democracy in the world. Democracy is instrumentally valuable in enabling diverse people to bring their claims to public attention and to fight for more justice. Democracy enables us to learn from each other, through interactions to help change values and develop shared public values, and hold each other accountable for collective choices. However, as Martha Nussbaum (2010, p. 142) advises, while democracies “have great rational and imaginative powers”, they are also “prone to some serious flaws in reasoning”. She adds that if “we base education mainly on profitability in the global market these deficiencies are magnified, producing greedy obtuseness and technically trained docility that threatens the very life of democracy itself”.

I therefore takes up the relationship between democracy and the potential contributions of education through the lens of epistemic justice (Kidd et al. 2017), where the obverse of epistemic justice means that a person is in a disadvantaged position to influence public discourse. Given the egalitarian importance of epistemic justice, the paper makes the argument for capabilities as the ends of education, and more specifically for an education capability which will support public reasoning as a process of inclusive knowing and telling which is crucial in Sen’s (2009) approach and constitutive of “good” development and human well-being. Sen (2006, p. 1) emphasizes the tremendous importance of education in the difference it can make to human lives and development actions. Formal education enables access to knowledge through the curriculum, expanding the “reach of reason” (2006, p. 5) and potentially forming democratic and sharing values. Education, Sen reminds us, includes but goes beyond skills as the solution to economic ills (the current obsession of much global policy and funding). Rather, education should embrace “an appreciation of the importance of freedom and reasoning as well as friendship” (p. 6). Education can then contribute to personal development and to democratic participation, as well, of course, to economic opportunities. At issue is that education matters in people’s lives and in global development goals. Education in Sen’s approach can do much to foster and open out individual human aspirations, enabling new imaginative neighbourhoods, access to worthwhile knowledge and overall flourishing, as well as helping to build more generous and decent societies in which the well-being of all is both important and inter-related. While this is not guaranteed in and through education, it is possible if the conditions for capability expansion, including politics, social arrangements and collective actions work together with individual agency to produce equitable individual and social development. This is then a counter-argument to the narrow neoliberal education that Nussbaum (2010) rightly decries.

The paper is further located within social egalitarianism which understands an equal society as constituted by the attitudes and relations among people (Wolff 2015) and which starts from a concern with observed injustice. We then ask of education: how fair are epistemic practices and how inclusive the relationships that support these opportunities and epistemic outcomes in societies which are themselves less than fair whether along race, gender or social class or other fault lines? Nonetheless, the focus cannot be only on developing the dispositions of individuals absent attention to the social institutions within which attitudes, values and relationships are formed, as Anderson (2012) rightly points out. Thus, I do not ignore the material, structural and systemic basis shaping society, or that formal and especially public education, with which I am concerned here, cannot be expected to change society or to resolve issues of unemployment and defective labour markets on its own. Still, framed as a public good education can contribute substantially to democratic and justice-based development thinking about what kind of society we wish to build.

I write from the context of South Africa, a middle-income country marked by deep inequalities and widespread poverty (Sulla and Zikhali 2018); this informs my concerns although I hope these have much wider resonance. Living in working in South Africa with its particular history of apartheid and its aftermath, one cannot but be aware that those who hold political and social power, whether in the broader society or in education institutions (or both), also wield epistemic power, and that democracy is a fragile thing. Anticipating many of the current debates on epistemic justice, the late South African activist and philosopher Steve Biko (1978, p. 49) wrote of the realization by black South Africans “that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”. Thus, our epistemic lives in education are not abstractions but active and relational, done well or less well (Barker et al. 2018). Ideas and knowledge matter for participation in inclusive meaning-making (and hence to politics, education, the professions, and so on) so that who has access to these epistemic goods at various layers of society is then a matter of justice. Epistemic injustice—with considerable pedagogical relevance for education –not only blocks the flow of knowledge but also “the flow of evidence, doubts, critical ideas and other epistemic inputs” (Fricker 2015, p. 3). This is starkly apparent in South Africa with its low-quality public schools and stratified university system—and relevant everywhere. The South African Constitution emphasizes human dignity, yet practices and processes often fall short of enabling the epistemic contributions that are fundamental to human well-being, to a dignified human life and to political freedoms. In short, from where I stand, epistemic justice matters tremendously.

Capabilities and functionings: beyond the economics only argument

Sen proposes that the real bite of a theory or approach to justice or to education can largely be understood from what information is included (or excluded) as relevant for the evaluation. He reminds us of the informational basis for judgment in justice-facing policy decisions:

Each evaluative approach can, to a great extent, be characterized by its informational basis: the information that is needed for making judgments using that approach and—no less important—the information that is excluded from a direct evaluative role in that approach. (Sen 1999b, p. 56)

What then do we put in the space of education judgments? The current emphasis is increasingly on what can be measured and often what can be measured is generally a very narrow indicator of education. For example, how many children complete a number of years of schooling, or how many minority-ethnic students go to university, or how many teachers a school has, or what percentage of GDP is spent on education. These are important things to know but they are insufficient for a full picture of what makes education worthwhile or whether a quality education is made widely available. Thus, in South Africa 5.9 percent of GDP is spent on education (CRA 2019), relatively high for a middle-income country, and yet the public schooling system is largely of poor quality (Spaull 2014).

Rather than focusing only on resource inputs and indicators as the measure of how well education is doing, the claim made here is that a good education should seek to advance students’ capabilities, that is, the substantive freedoms each student has to choose and to exercise a combination of ways of beings and doings (functionings) that they have reason to value for their own flourishing. Sen (1999a, b) developed his approach to development (and influenced the construction of the UNDP human development index, see Haq 2003) to counter the dominant focus at that time either on GDP as a measure of national well-being, or on aggregations of subjective satisfaction. He proposed rather, a focus on each person and how well his or her life is going. We would then evaluate a school, college or education system according to the capabilities that students have developed through education. If students have wider capability sets they are more likely to participate fully in all aspects of their education. The basic claim for advancing justice in and through education is then that we use capabilities and/or functionings as the measure and end of [educational] development by looking at what people are actually able to choose—in an informed way—to be and to do in their lives. We ask not only about who has more or less capabilities and the corresponding functionings, but also about the processes and the conditions of possibility under which functionings are enabled or limited by intersecting personal, social and environmental conversion factors (Robeyns 2017) in specific contexts. Because people differ, it is not enough just to have the same bundle of resources, as some people may be worse-off than others even with the same resources. For example: a student with physical disabilities, a female student who encounters gender discrimination, a student from a low-income household, a student who speaks a minority language which is not the formal language of education provision, and so on. ‘General’ conversion factors apply to everyone across the social context but will be differently realized for the resulting advantage of each person, for example, the conversion factor of gender will work out differently for girls and boys, men and women. General factors of ethnicity, language, gender, disability, and so on, including the actions of others and the relationships within which (education) processes are embedded shape what each person can do and be. In this way, conversion factors take into account the impact of structures (social, economic, institutional, and so on) which may undermine or facilitate the full inclusion of each person in education, or stand in the way of converting the formal right to schooling into effective access and participation. Thus, conversion factors shape our ability to convert our resources and endowments into capabilities.

Figure 1 illustrates these key features of the capability approach, which allows for attention to context, structures but also agency in making choices. Conversion factors intervene to shape how we are able to convert our bundle of resources into capabilities and intervene again in the form of adapted preferences (what we take to be possible for ourselves) in converting capabilities into realized functionings. Decisions are shaped by social norms and structures, public policy, commodities, and so on, which may reduce choice for some and increase opportunities for others as we adjust our aspirations to reflect available possibilities for that person (Walker 2018). The point to be emphasized, is that what each person is able to do and to be cannot be considered independently of the opportunity set provided by the social context. This allows for a comprehensive approach to evaluating justice, epistemic justice and education’s contributions.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Resources, capabilities, functionings and agency

Full size image

More specifically, education as a general capability (Robeyns 2017), with local contextual realizations, is key everywhere to fostering many other capabilities such as health, gender equality, and others. Thus, Sen (2003, p. 12) emphasizes that, “the ability to exercise freedom may, to a considerable extent, be directly dependent on the education we have received”. To count as education in capability terms, processes and outcomes ought to make each person’s life “richer with the opportunity of reflective choice”, “enhancing the ability of people to help themselves and to influence the world”. Sen (2009) further argues for a non-ideal account and comparative assessments of justice (is the approach or outcome of situation A more just than situation B), rather than first working out ideal justice. Ideals that we reach and strive towards—such as a democratic and equal public education—would still inform development but we do not have to wait for ideal structures and institutions to be in place before acting towards justice. This approach works well for education as a space in which we must act now and not delay change while we wait for perfection in our education institutions, or wait for participatory democratic conditions.

However, it is not capabilities that dominates education policy globally at this time, but rather human capital and economic development. So how does this human capital approach fare, when brought under the scrutiny of capabilities and agency freedoms? Human capital has generated a sophisticated literature, for example, the work by James Heckman and his colleagues (see https://cehd.uchicago.edu), and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with linking education and human capital. Indeed, we expect that education will develop each person’s stock of knowledge, skills and qualities such as tenacity, which they can mobilize for achieving paid work. The difficulty arises when education and education systems are understood only instrumentally as the means to advancing each person’s productive ability measured in terms of goods and services he/she produces, with consumption the ultimate goal of economic activity. Decontextualized individuals are assumed to consciously and rationally invest in themselves (in more education) in order to improve their own economic returns through a promotion or better earnings (Walker 2012). Better-educated workers are assumed to be more productive in generating wealth (hence the contemporary focus on high-knowledge economies and the importance of universities in research and innovation). Economic and not human development is prioritized as the end. Wider benefits of education such as health, or civic participation, or more gender equality are valued insofar as they add to human capital, rather than intrinsically as something good in themselves. Human capital supports an educational meritocracy in that the assumption is that sufficient investment guarantees social mobility through education, with income disparities explained by differing investments in education by individuals and families, rather than by gender, social class or ethnic differences. The advantages of family wealth and social networks and access to private schools, for example, are not considered. Social mobility through human capital formation then displaces concerns with equality in education.

Yet this focus on human capital may not be fully functional for education. A one-dimensional view of education as only for human capital and jobs may not necessarily generate more equality, absent paying attention to social and global arrangements intersecting with real lives. When education is understood primarily in monetary terms we have examples such as that found in the OECD Education at a Glance Report (2009) which claims that a “modest” goal for all OECD countries of boosting their average PISA scores in science, reading and mathematics by 25 points over the next 20 years would increase OECD gross domestic product by USD 115 trillion over the lifetime of the generation born in 2010. More “aggressive” goals, the OECD suggests, could result in gains in the order of USD 260 trillion. Well-being is not mentioned.

To be sure, the capability approach does not ignore human capital—it is important in all sorts of way for being a participant in economic life, and education should prepare young people for this—as noted earlier. Sen (2003) explains that both human capital and human capabilities have a concept of agency but this works differently in each approach. Human capital concentrates more narrowly on human agency with regard to making a person more efficient in economic production but could nonetheless promote social inclusion by improving young people’s skills and hence their job opportunities. Human capabilities offer a wider understanding, focusing on freedoms to lead lives we have reason to value and to enhance the choices we could make. Thus, for Sen, human capital fits inside human capabilities, and would capture the benefits of education (and value them)—in a way that both includes but also exceeds its role in human capital formation. He is not against human capital but against human capital as the primary focus of the purpose of education. Human capital also does not take account of the diversity of human beings; different people with the same levels of education and the same qualifications may not all fare well in the labour market if, for example, there is a gender pay gap or gender discrimination in promoting women to senior education positions. Thus, Sen reminds us that, “We must go beyond the notion of human capital, after acknowledging its reach and relevance. The broadening that is needed is additional and cumulative” (2003, p. 36). So human capital has relevance—but it offers only a partial story of education and well-being.

Epistemic justice and education

Part of the story of education ought to include fostering epistemic justice. Kidd et al. (2017, p. 1) explain that epistemic injustice “refers to those forms of unfair treatment that relate to issue of knowledge, understanding and participation in communicative practices”. Put simply, if you are in a disadvantaged position to influence discourse you are subject to epistemic injustice and reduced epistemic agency (Fricker 2015). That is, you are wronged specifically in your capacity as a knower; you do not have a voice that is recognized. Epistemic injustice might include silencing, having one’s contributions distorted (“so what you are actually saying is …”.), having less status in the communicative practices, being marginalized, being discriminated against, and so on (Kidd et al. 2017). Thus, epistemic justice and injustice processes are central to our educational and social lives in education. Education is demonstrably a space where epistemic justice matters; it is after all where being a knower and being able to act as a knower to gain epistemic access and develop epistemic agency is rather important. This matters further because the lack of epistemic freedoms can be a major barrier to preparation for democratic life more broadly. Indeed, Fricker (2015) argues that being able to contribute epistemic materials to the shared common resource of ideas is fundamental to human well-being and hence is an egalitarian value. She (2015, p. 10) proposes that one of our most basic human needs, “is to use our reason in order to discern the everyday facts and social meanings that condition, constrain, and make sense of our shared lives”. All students/citizens should be able to make epistemic contributions and to have such contributions taken up socially, neither rejected nor under-rated.

Fricker (2007) explains two forms of epistemic injustice, both of which may manifest in education settings. Hermeneutical injustice is structural and becomes evident in attempts to make an experience intelligible to oneself or to someone else, for example, experiences of racism or other social exclusions. Hermeneutical injustice also arises when the injustice is understood by the powerless, but is still not communicable to those with power (teachers, schools, education systems) because they will not or cannot hear because a student is a girl, a migrant, and so on. Experiences that are outside of what had been marked out as the student norm are not heard or acknowledged. This unequal participation in generating social meanings generates hermeneutic marginalization of a person or group in the absence of non-distorted discursive resources among the dominant. This would be the case even where people themselves are strongly aware of the injustice. In both cases of hermeneutic injustice, people are denied epistemic functionings. The second form, testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007) arises through a deficit of credibility owing to prejudice in the hearer’s judgment about the speaker as being able to contribute knowledge, for example, against a minority language speaker, or someone poor who both experience a deficit of credibility because of language or class prejudice.

What are the implications for fostering democracy in education and beyond? If democracy is judged “not just by the institutions that formally exist but to the extent to which different voices from diverse sections of the people can actually be heard” (Sen 2009, p. xiii), what worthwhile education capabilities count for epistemic justice? Sen (2004, p. 335) has always refused to identify a fixed and complete list of universal capabilities, preferring that these be identified through “general social discussion or public reasoning” so that the valuation issue is explicit. As he explains, we cannot “freeze a list of capabilities for all societies for all time to come, irrespective of what the citizens come to understand and value” (2004, p. 336). Rather, reasoned agreement, the “reach and effectiveness of open dialogue” (Sen 1999a, p. 10) and associated political freedoms are intrinsically valuable and “a crucial part of good lives for individuals as social beings”. Importantly, public reasoning as both a building block of democracy and a means to secure it enables objectivity because it requires that we submit our beliefs to informed scrutiny from plural perspectives. Sen (2006, p. 231) understands this as “the Smithian model of fair arbitration” by which he means that people need to make an effort to determine “how their own practices and conventions would look to others, including people who are informed about but not entirely reared in that society”. In this way, we can critically scrutinize local parochialism and consider the experiences of others. In Sen’s view, we are able as human beings to deliberate and judge about values and choices and reach a settlement on equality despite all our differences. We can reach determinations, which are more rather than less just. This process is then itself constitutive of democracy, setting up a potentially virtuous cycle. Even if the realizations of reasoning are imperfect, they ought to lead to better (educational) development outcomes. Through public reasoning, we can rank better and worse alternatives, decide on trade-offs, and work together to decide what justice requires. Such public debate is foundational to democracy and democratic institutions and the advancement of human freedoms, in his view. Moreover, democratic rights are also related to economic security; Sen shows that famines, for example, do not occur in democracies. He further makes it clear that democratic reasoning and democracy is not the sole preserve or imposition of the West, rather there are “powerful traditions of reasoned argument” (2009, p. xiii) across different civilizations and historical times. There is a case to be made that to select capabilities wisely and well, we need to foster epistemic justice and education is a crucial space where such participatory freedoms can be nurtured.

A democracy-facing capability fostered in and through education

Having presented an argument for capabilities and functionings as the measure of worthwhile human development and for an equal society, the question then is which capabilities we select for education. The argument from and for democracy is that the democratic process implications of Sen’s advocacy of inclusive public reasoning as the space in which people share, contest and evaluate which capabilities matter, holds great relevance for the potential contribution of education. It requires that we recognize each person as being an equal participant or interlocutor, both a knower and a teller, and that we make the effort to understand others, and seek to enable fair chances to influence the matter under public discussion. As Putnam (2015, p. 91) rightly points out, the literature on equality has not treated such understanding as an explicit object of egalitarian concern, and yet it shapes our capacity to respond to each other as equals. People can be disadvantaged by failures of understanding such that this becomes a matter of epistemic injustice.

The epistemic quality of discussion then requires conditions of inclusion in which we can learn from each other and teach each other in coming to just determinations and the critical examination of our values. The further point is the need to learn skills of reasoning and acting together and to develop as the self-scrutinizing agents that Sen believes we are or can be. Here education can play a substantial role because we cannot stop with our own subjectivities, however well scrutinized. Dialogue requires us to do the hard work in which we set aside temporarily our own opinions (on race, gender, social class, inequality, and so forth) and develop our capabilities to explore and imagine the views of others different from ourselves—from their standpoints. This is not a call to reject our own beliefs but to be open to the possibility that we may be wrong and to be open to seeing an issue through the eyes of those who hold often radically different views. In education, we could think of this as a pedagogy of doubt rather than of certainty, although this is not to be confused with learning how to arrive at considered judgments and evaluations.

To this end, I propose that Fricker’s (2015) “epistemic contribution capability”, which she explains as “being able to contribute epistemic materials to the shared common resource”, be taken up as a core education freedom at all levels of formal education. My interest is in the specificity of teaching and learning, curriculum and pedagogy in classrooms, although Fricker’s conceptualization is much broader than this. The pedagogical implications will differ across levels of education but if her capability is crucial for public reasoning and fostering democratic cultures, we should not deny to young children the opportunity to learn how to exercise this freedom, to determine what they themselves value, and to be supported through education to do so. Indeed, Bessant (2014, p. 148) argues that it is possible for children “to make well-informed decisions about matters like the political party they want in office if they are provided with good information, opportunities to reason and opportunities to make choices”. That children have less experience, she suggests, places an obligation on teachers and others to ensure that they are actively supported in ways that make it possible for them to exercise this freedom. Fostering the epistemic capability means enabling learners at all stages of education to function as knowers, enquirers and tellers, and to be recognized as potentially capable in all these roles.

Fricker (2015) argues for a comprehensive notion of the person as both a receiver and a giver in epistemically hospitable situations so that a person is able to give her own contributions and receive contributions from others, thereby building conditions of mutual esteem and friendly trust. The capability would be developed through a range of collective curriculum (what is learnt, which resonates with calls in South Africa to decolonize the curriculum), and pedagogical encounters (how it is learnt) which involve sharing information and forms of social understanding, and in which we develop as epistemic agents. The capability generates a rich notion of students as sharing obligations to and with others, so that the necessary assumption is that the educational duty of each person is to treat others as special by virtue of their capacity to share epistemically. Moreover, in Fricker’s view, the capability would address one of our most human basic needs, “to use our reason in order to discern the everyday facts and social meanings that condition, constrain, and make sense of our shared lives” (Fricker 2015, p. 10), making it of particular egalitarian concern because of our specific human need to use theoretical reasoning in making meaning and exercising our agency.

In practice, democratic discussions, epistemic contributions and egalitarian inclusion may not be easy, even though for equality, all students have their contributions taken up—neither rejected nor under-rated. We cannot advance the capability through misrecognitions—practicing racism, sexism, ableism, or by discounting speakers that we do not agree with, without prior critical scrutiny of their positions. To exclude a student, say because of nationality, ethnicity, language or gender prejudice, is to cramp their epistemic growth and to wrong them “in their capacity as an epistemic subject” (Fricker 2007, p. 53). Regrettably, such practices are often embedded in people’s ways of knowing so that in practice we would need to find pedagogical strategies which do not shut down conflicting views, and which support students to move towards rejecting embedded ways of thinking and which recognize all students as participants in the dialogue.

Relationships enable the development of the capability and may be intrinsically good beyond being instrumental for the epistemic capability, valued for their own sake, worth pursuing for their own sake (Hoffmann and Metz 2017). The more humanness we exhibit in and through relationships, the more our personhood is developed. The way to help another person develop is to foster her personhood, and more specifically, in this case, her epistemic capability. Relationships of solidarity are then integral to our capabilities and functionings and of course to public reasoning, which logically requires relationships of reciprocity and non-domination with others or the deliberative process would not work well. This is not to argue for the priority of an educational community over the individual, or for cramped agency, or for restrictions of the development of individual agency and autonomy. It is to emphasize that we do not develop alone but in relationships with others, even while we still recognize the importance of each person as an end (Robeyns 2017). In the education case, developing the capability understood in this relational way only in some students at the expense of others would mean that for all students the capability would be reduced and not fully developed. Even if, for example, middle class students flourish in and through education, if working class students experience the exclusions of hermeneutical marginalization or testimonial injustice, then neither group could be said to have the capability or to have it fully developed.

Take the example of critical thinking as an aspect of public reasoning. Developing this capability for most of us requires social participation, which requires that others affirm the integrity of one’s intellectual capacities. We learn to think critically not simply through our own efforts but with others in a genuinely collective enterprise in which we recognize each other as worthy interlocutors. Bohman (1997) highlights students being placed in a position to learn the skill of initiating dialogue or making a proposal about an issue. Secondly, he notes learning the ability to engage productively in argument and counter-argument (in ways that are respectful of and value all identities). Thirdly, students need skills in finding ways to harmonize all proposals on the table, that is, in coming to agreement. Finally, students need to learn how to persuade in debate but not to manipulate. All the ways that Hoffman and Metz (2017) include for developing our personhood: co-operation, taking pleasure in the achievements [learning] of others, judging others to have dignity, compassion, respect and recognition, and so on, would characterize pedagogy and ethical learning to advance the capability. Pedagogical conditions such as these would need to provide the freedom processes for the epistemic capability to take the shape of actual opportunities. Coercion, exploitation, generating fearful emotions (mocking, marginalizing or ignoring knowledge contributions from some knowers, for example) of whatever kind would need to be ruled out. If students experience the emotional and cognitive dissonance of not belonging at school or university, they will struggle to make their own, distinctive experiences intelligible to themselves and to others. As Fricker (2015) explains, people are prevented from becoming fully who they are; they are denied the opportunity to be fully included in the epistemic community.

The upshot is that, while some students are able to make their epistemic contributions “others find their capability thins or vanishes altogether in some contexts” (Fricker 2015, p. 10). Epistemic filtering or disregard reduces epistemic agency. Hookway (2010) points out that if we come to lack confidence in our ability to contribute, this eventually attacks “also our ability to properly participate in epistemic activities at all” (2010, p. 160); this seems crucial for the space of education and for critical reasoning learned there (and elsewhere). The distinction is not sharp but interesting nonetheless in that Hookway expands epistemic injustice to include practices where someone is treated as if they do not have the capacity even to ask interesting or important questions, prior even to their contributions being disregarded. In this way, people are treated not only as non-knowers but also as non-participants.

Thus, Fricker (2007) suggests that societies (and in this case, education institutions) “train” our sensibilities in ways which are flawed, given the prejudices that already exist (and which constitute an element of conversion factors). The virtue to be developed, she proposes, is “reflexive critical awareness” (2007, p. 91) in order to identify how far our suspected prejudices have influenced our judgment. In this way, we learn to become virtuous hearers through critically ethical reflection where we are put in a position to know better and reflexive critical awareness is placed pedagogically within our reach; it must therefore constitute the conditions of educational possibility. According to Fricker, if supportive conditions are in place, no one with relevant epistemic materials to offer would be prevented from doing so for “epistemically irrelevant” (2015, p. 80) reasons: for example, because a person was different in some way. All students ought to be able “to contribute to the common cognitive store [knowledge and understanding] in this everyday way, and thereby enjoy the mutual regard and trust that go with epistemic reciprocity” (Fricker 2015, p. 79), that is, mutual epistemic regard, recognition and valuing.

The processes required to foster epistemic justice and the epistemic contribution capability also require clearer attention to the role of emotions in reasoning and cultivating equal respect than Fricker allows for. It is precisely emotions that may lead us to compromise free speech or fail in building fair relationships; divorcing rational deliberation from emotions is then not helpful in fostering productive political emotions (Nussbaum 2013). Nussbaum shows us that emotions are forms of thought (emotions-thoughts), shaping how we come to know ethically and how we forge relationships of democratic community; they shape the landscape of our moral lives and are part of ethical learning. She (2013, p. 6) asks us to imagine the ways in which emotions “can support the basic principles of the political culture of an aspiring yet imperfect so that we foster attachment to democratic norms”, including, I think, understanding our classrooms as microcosm of this aspiring society. Attachments to human dignity and respect are not simply matters of thought but need to be nourished by enabling pedagogies which provide experiences of imagining the lives of other and fostering “an inner grasp of their full and equal humanity” (p. 380).

If we take the epistemic contribution capability and the corresponding emotions—the opportunity to develop it and to achieve it—as relevant to the informational basis of judgement for educational justice, then if some students in schools and universities are excluded for epistemically irrelevant reasons, the frustration of their capability will reveal wider structures of inequality. Who gets access to what knowledge under what conditions and with what outcomes? In societies where social class or other inequalities are accepted, it may be especially important for public education at all levels to foster the epistemic capability there is “a steadfast refusal to see that real inequity is involved in the way [students] are treated in their own society” (Sen 2009, p. 162).

Free to speak?

The epistemic contribution capability requires social uptake conditions of freedoms to speak; by safeguarding free speech, we safeguard the epistemic capability of citizens (Fricker 2015), whether children or young people. However, the issue of free speech—at least on many university campuses (and perhaps in increasingly ill-tempered public debate in some countries)—has also become rather fraught of late. Such debates have no less relevance for schools, which may seek to advance narrow and exclusionary understandings of what it means to be human. On the one hand, some see freedom of speech as a basic epistemological and democratic principle (as Sen would), while on the other hand, others argue for “safe” spaces for learning in which “safe” means excluding some points of view. Ben-Porath (2017) characterizes this as the tension between free expression and inclusion. Indeed, Ben-Porath is not in favour of an experience-and-identity-based epistemology whereby we can speak only about own our histories and perspectives without engaging with those of others different from ourselves. She supports vigorous public debate but also argues for “dignitary safety”, which she describes as having a sense of belonging and the confidence to be seen as an equal interlocutor, so that all the pedagogical conditions described above would be necessary for developing the epistemic capability. Harassment and intimidation or inciting public hatred to force through a point of view would undermine Sen’s concern with admitting all positional objectivities into the dialogue. The point is to enable universities and university classrooms, schools and school classrooms as places where ideas can confront each other through public reasoning, rather than seeing them as political battlegrounds for one set of ideas over another. Ben-Porath argues that free expression and inclusivity can and should be reconciled and we should embrace both rather than choose one over the other.

This is of special importance to universities where scholars, teachers and students require “inclusive freedom” in order to “inquire, to question and probe established views and new visions without fear of retribution or silencing” (Ben-Porath 2017, p. 31). Free and open exchanges in university classrooms and public spaces are then “a necessary condition for the pursuit of knowledge” (p. 37) and for developing our democratic capabilities. The conditions for inclusive free speech require intellectual honesty in classrooms: learning the proper way to disagree, learning to consider other opinions, investigating controversial issues in the sciences, the humanities and the professions are all “key to the education of …citizens” (Ben-Porath 2017, p. 91). Under such circumstances, universities can play a significant role in contributing from many perspectives to coming to reasoned agreement about a society’s conception of development and the role of universities in advancing that development, including in the education of future teachers in schools.

Concluding thoughts

Epistemically irrelevant social conversion factors can reduce public education as a vital space for all kinds of voices to be expressed and to be listened to attentively—and we may wish to intervene educationally so that this central capability is not thwarted for the wrong reasons. However, this will require attention to our practices in education and not just to the individual dispositions noted by Fricker. Anderson (2012, p. 165) points out that we cannot rely on individual contributions only to remedy systemic defects—how we connect up and coordinate virtuous individuals matters. She explains that systems—and here we can include a school or university or an educational system—are the spaces in which we arrange the development of inquirers and the circulation, uptake, and incorporation of individual epistemic contributions. Reform of systems and structures is needed to ensure that justice is done—and secured—to each knower, and to groups of inquirers so that our social (educational) practices are just and we can work to dismantle epistemic oppressions beyond individual uptake.

In short, the challenge is both transactional and structural, as we cannot always easily set aside our prejudices. Anderson is clear that structural remedies are not “competing with virtue-based remedies for epistemic injustice”. Rather, “structural remedies are put in place to enable individual virtue to work, by giving it favorable conditions” so that “structural remedies may be viewed as virtue-based remedies for collective agents” (2012, p. 168). Thus, epistemic justice needs to be “scaled up” to become a virtue of social institutions that can coordinate individual transformations to maximum effect. In my own context of deep structural injustices of race and of gender, changing how people transact with each other and changing how they understand each other is tremendously important; it is necessary but not sufficient without also changing the conditions under which such transactions take place.

Returning to education, epistemic justice and the democratic concerns at the beginning of this paper, my argument is that the epistemic contribution capability is distinctively educational, distinctive for educational quality and significant in later life and participation in society. More broadly, epistemic justice is foundational for functioning democracies and to “the protective power of democracy” (Sen 1999a, p. 16) and shared democratic rights which are “strongly missed when it is most needed”, as Sen (1999a, p. 16) explains. Making sure everyone can develop the capability is complex and hence a challenge. Nonetheless, it is something we ought to aspire to in education.

Nonetheless, Sen (2009, p. 401) cautions that, “We go as far as we reasonably can” for justice, and he advocates “incompleteness”. Indeed, in education, we do not expect perfection in expanding capabilities but we do ask that educators and students work in formal learning spaces and processes to take us towards rather than away from the foundational epistemic capability and the conditions of possibility to develop it. Putnam (2015, p. 109) underlines the point well when he writes that, “Those whom we understand best are those whose humanity is most vivid to us. And for most of us at least, the better we understand someone, the harder it is to perceive her as other than another person”. There is, he says, “hope in that”. As a relational capability, it requires opportunity, training and repetition to learn to reason logically, to scrutinize one’s own reasons and those of others, to hold one’s own beliefs and prejudices open to question and change, to make informed judgments, to listen carefully and respectfully, and to recognize all in the dialogue as worthy interlocutors.

Educational institutions should undertake hopeful if not perfect work, equipping students with subject and professional knowledge and a range of public reasoning abilities that will enable them to participate fully and meaningfully in education, work and in making a democratic society. Indeed, achieving deeper public reasoning and ‘thick’ justice depends rather crucially on an education, which takes epistemic justice and the associated epistemic capability, together with the necessary conditions for its development, very seriously.